Ireland has not been used to people coming to live on its shores. Irish people on the contrary have been more used traditionally to outward migration. Today however, it is noticeable that people from many parts of the world live in Ireland. The Polish community is the largest of the many non-Irish groups in Ireland today. We often meet Polish people in the course of our daily lives in Ireland, and Polish has become a language that we often hear in the street and see featured on public signs in the urban and rural landscape.

This volume is the result of a project largely funded by the Irish Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, on language and the Polish community in Ireland, France and Austria. The project first originated in a conversation some of us had at the Sociolinguistics Symposium in Limerick in 2006. Its aim was to focus multiple perspectives on the relationship between language, culture and the lives of Polish migrants settling into a new country. The story of the Polish diaspora in different countries, ‘old’ migration countries (Austria and France) and a ‘new’ one (Ireland), is told in the interviews with the Polish participants in all three.

Contributors to the volume are established researchers as well as early-stage scholars. The composition of the research group was multidisciplinary as well as interdisciplinary, resulting in a rich exchange of ideas at project meetings. The group was also multilingual, comprising English L1 speakers as well as Polish L1 speakers and a Czech L1 speaker, who also all speak other languages. The English and Czech L1 speakers all learnt Polish throughout the period of the research project. This meant that the richness of the linguistic situation under investigation was always present to everyone’s mind. Psycholinguistic as well as sociolinguistic aspects were investigated in order to arrive at as full a picture as possible of the lives of the participants, their views of their current lives and their future, and their process of acquiring the language of their new context, whether in Ireland, France or Austria. The interviews with the Polish participants out of which the book first sprang, give us insights into language use as well into people’s lives and the events relating to their experience of migration.